Video games have their share of controversy. You have anti-games crusaders calling games like Grand Theft Auto ‘murder simulators’, you have concerned parents pointing the finger at Mortal Kombat if their kid is violent or maladjusted in school and you have a whole host of legislators that don’t have a stake in gaming and want to see it regulated if not banned. All of the above are bad. That being said there are plenty of games out there that are just despicable, cringe worthy bad.
10. Desert Bus
Not violent, horrible or gory, Desert Bus is content to be just despicable. Slated for release as part of a Penn and Teller party game compilation Desert bus was a extended middle finger to American legislators that advertised the creation of a less violent, more realistic game. Desert Bus was realistic all right. Eight hours of slowly keeping a speed limited bus on the road where the highlight of hte entire experience is a bug splattering the windscreen around hour 5. The game can’t be paused, nor can the drive button be taped down. You just have to endlessly adjust the angle and stay on the road. And when you get there? You get one point and the chance to drive back.
9. Happy Wheels
Happy Wheels is a fun but cringeworthy platformer in which you have to guide one of several wheeled characters around a dangerous landscape while watching bits of them fall of as they hit things. This game certainly isn’t nice but it is very addictive.
8. Revolution X
A horrible branded piece of crap Revolution X was one of the first shooters that I’ve ever played. Initially i thought it was pretty good… until i played Wolfenstein and Virtua Cop and just about any other game. This Aerosmith powered catastrophe had you fighting the New Order Nation also known as the No Fun Police all over the world in order to free Aerosmith members. Two things stand out in this game: it’s terrible and your gun fires CDs, which makes no sense.
7. ET the Extra-Terrestrial
ET is world renowned for being a game so bad that it destroyed the whole video game industry. A rushed, horrible production, ET for the Atari 2600 was cranked out in massive volumes but the game was terrible, didn’t sell at all and was carted wholesale to a landfill. This caused a panic amongst game companies and destroyed the American game market so bad that it didn’t recover until Nintendo stepped in all the way from Japan.
6. Custer’s Revenge
… And a good thing too, because this is the kind of crap that was being produced for the Atari 2600. Custer’s Revenge, also known as the White Man Came is a game about dodging arrows as a naked cowboy (presumably Gen. Custer) in order to get to a tied up native American… and rape her. With games like these, thank the Coyote spirit for ET.
5. Shaq-Fu
This terrible beat-em-up tried to capitalize on the name while delivering a dreadful product. Shaquille O’Neal was huge (no pun intended) when the game came out and the producers thought that they could get away with just the name power, a recipe replicated by many nowadays games (I’m looking at you Aliens: Colonial Marines). They failed. Miserably so.
4. Daikatana
John Romero was a huge name back in the day, the creator of Doom and Quake, and the trailblazer for a whle generation of shooters. So there was understandably a lot of hype over his game Daikatana, a game that had promised to expand all our horizons further. The game dragged on in development hell for three years and came out as a broken, so-mediocre-it’s-horrible and, strangely enough, a little bit racist game. Teach us to believe the hye over long awaited games…
3. Duke Nukem Forever
Stuck in development hell for a lot longer than 3 years, Duke Nukem Forever was supposed to be a nod back to the games of our childhood, the very first generation of shooters as Duke Nukem 3D was one of the best games of that age. Nobody still expected this game to be made. But it did. Huge mistake. There’s no point in describing just how bad the bugs, repetitive gameplay and cliché catchphrases were. Let’s just say that every gamer that has ever played this has felt as if Custer above had had his way with his childhood.
2. Modern Warfare 2
When critics of video games climb the soapbox and start howling about murder simulators what they’re looking for is a. a violent video game in which b. something despicable happens and that’s c. Extremely popular. The GTA series, while violent is a sandbox game so it has the excuse of ‘some’ unsavoury players doing crazy things but when a massive triple A title like MW2 forces you to play through a slaughter of innocent civilians as part of the storyline you know that somewhere out there there’s a jack Thompson chuckling to himself.
1. Any Japanese Rape Game
Rape is no laughing matter but our friends the Japanese have a morbid and disgusting fascination with it, which leads to such games as Rapelay and Battle Raper. We couldn’t show anything out of those games nor do we find it appropriate to discuss gameplay so here’s a picture of a cute kitten instead.
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